Biblia Arabica becomes an Academies project: Q&A with Nathan P. Gibson and Ronny Vollandt

1. In early December 2025, the Union of German Academies of Sciences and Humanities gave its approval for a new long-term project on Arabic translations of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament. The project, entitled “Biblia Arabica: Critical edition and comprehensive digital inventory of Arabic Old Testament manuscripts and their paratexts” will run for 21 years (2026–2046) and is based at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Munich and the Academy of Sciences and Literature in Mainz (see the announcements of the new project here, here, and here ). It will be jointly led by Prof. Dr. Ronny Vollandt (LMU Munich) and Prof. Dr. Nathan P. Gibson (Goethe University Frankfurt). Building on earlier research undertaken in the DFG-DIP project “Biblia Arabica” (2012–2018), the new project will be the first comprehensive study of Arabic translations of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament. The team will identify and describe around 8,200 manuscripts and make them digitally available through a selection of editions and English translations. They will also investigate historical contexts, translators, and usage traditions. The aim is to preserve this unique heritage, and make it visible and accessible worldwide. In this Q&A, the two PIs explain the background and objectives of the new project. 

2. Why are Arabic Bible translations important? They’re not the earliest versions of the Bible. Will they reveal anything new?

Nathan Gibson: They could reveal something new about the biblical text, but there are also other reasons to study them. For over a thousand years, Jewish and Christian communities have made many translations of the Bible into Arabic. Partly this was because they were speaking Arabic and wanted to better understand the Bible, study it, and use it in liturgy. Like any literary work, translations are made with a purpose and audience in mind. Yes, you can read them to understand the original, but these are not the earliest witnesses to the biblical text. The most significant thing about Arabic Bible translations is that — because of their purpose and audience — they give a glimpse into the interests of the communities that made them, their priorities so to speak, on a spiritual, intellectual, and even material level. When did they translate very literally, in order to help readers study the original text on a word-for-word level? When did they aim for stylish, idiomatic Arabic? When did they embrace terminology that was also found in the Quran or shy away from it? Our project aims to illuminate not only these translation techniques, but also the way the physical manuscripts containing the texts were made and used. If you look carefully enough at how the book was bound, which parchment or paper and ink were used, how many scribes did the writing, what readers wrote in the margins, and other factors, you can tell a lot about the people who treasured these books.

3. How many manuscripts are we talking about, and where are they?

Ronny Vollandt: That’s the amazing thing. In some other language traditions, there are thousands of ancient and medieval Bible manuscripts. The Institute for New Testament Textual Research (Institut für Neutestamentliche Textforschung, INTF), which publishes the standard critical edition of the Greek New Testament, has estimated the number of Greek New Testament manuscripts at 5,700. But the Arabic Bible tradition overwhelms even that. Our very preliminary estimate is that there are 8,200 Arabic manuscripts just of the Tanakh/Old Testament. Most of these are in European archives, while others are in various collections scattered across the Near East and North Africa. Some are hundreds of pages while others are single-page fragments, such as from the Cairo Genizah. But to date there is no comprehensive list like the one that exists for the Greek New Testament. One of the important objectives of the project is to list as many of these manuscripts as we can — both so that scholars can work on them and in order to document them as cultural heritage objects. In order to do that, we’ll pull together the partial existing lists and work from digitized manuscripts, but we also want to visit archives and see the manuscripts in person when possible. We’re extremely privileged to get crucial support in this from several religious communities that have been preserving and protecting these manuscripts for centuries.

4. And how will you cope with so many?

Nathan Gibson: Even in a 21-year project, it will be impossible to catalog and transcribe all of these manuscripts in the detailed way we would like to; we have to choose some to devote more attention to than others. However, we’ve put a lot of thought into how cutting-edge digital techniques can help us cover more ground. We’re involving machine-learning-driven handwritten text recognition (HTR) in the first step of transcribing manuscripts. This has had some major advances for Arabic and Hebrew scripts in recent years, and we expect significant progress in the next couple decades. Our preliminary tests showed that correcting these HTR-transcriptions — always with reference to the manuscript image — will let us work a lot faster than if we were typing each individual character. What’s more, we’ll be able to train different HTR-models for different styles of writing.

5. How are you going to make Arabic Bible translations available, and what kind of impact will that have?

Ronny Vollandt: There are close to half a billion Arabic speakers in the world, and they can access modern translations of the Bible. But they have no access to the Arabic Bible translations made hundreds of years ago, because they are either in difficult-to-access manuscripts or in academic publications. Our vision is that not only scholars, but also a much broader readership of Arabic, will be able to go online and look up a chapter and verse of the Bible and see several different ways it was translated over the last millennium or so. We consider that we have a responsibility, firstly to the heritage communities whose ancestors made these translations, and secondly to the world, to preserve these texts and make them more available. Because of this, all of our results will be available online in open-access form. The generous funding from the academies allows us to do that even for the scholarly monographs that we plan to release through “traditional” publishers. But we are prioritizing born-digital editions through web apps, which can show the text with interactive features that would be impossible in print. Openly licensed texts can also have a huge second-order impact. Researchers will be able to use these texts to investigate translation techniques or the use of certain words and concepts across history. Some of these types of initiatives have already been started for other Arabic texts through projects elsewhere such as KITAB/OpenITI and HUNAYNNET.

6. Why are you focusing on the Tanakh/Old Testament?

Nathan Gibson: For two reasons. First, this is the place where we can see the strongest interreligious aspects. Jewish, Christian, and Samaritan communities were doing translation, while Muslim authors were reading and quoting from the translations. As such, the relationships are going in all directions and can inform even interreligious discussions today. The second reason is simply that other projects (such as PAVONe at the University of Balamand in Lebanon) are working on Arabic New Testament translations, and we wanted our work to be complementary to this.

7. If so many communities were involved, were they all translating the Bible from the original Hebrew?

Ronny Vollandt: No, Jewish communities especially were using Hebrew as the basis, although they also had Aramaic versions (Targumim) that could come into play. Christian communities were often translating from Greek, Syriac-Aramaic, Coptic, or Latin. Some of the translators even did text-critical work by comparing different source texts. The fact that so many languages were involved in the Vorlagen, and that the translations were constantly being revised, makes the Arabic Bible an exceedingly complex textual tradition.

8. How did Muslims relate to these Arabic Bible translations?

Nathan Gibson: Historically, Muslim scholars have had a longstanding interest in the Bible, since the Quran mentions the Torah (Tawrāt), Psalms (Zabūr), and Gospel (Injīl). There is a lot of debate about when the Bible, or portions of it, first became available to Arabic speakers. But the first solid evidence we have is after the rise of Islam. It would seem that it took a couple centuries before Muslim authors had the opportunity to read major portions of the Bible in Arabic for themselves — and one can observe this shift in Islamic texts from the 9th century CE. The interest went in several directions. Some authors used the Bible to fill out the stories of prophets who also appear in the Quran. Others wanted to use it to make a case for Islam. And still others — or sometimes even the same authors — tried to show that it was unreliable and must have been corrupted by Jews and Christians. Regardless of the specific uses, these Arabic Bible texts were shared texts and sites of interreligious exchange. Ultimately, they form a cultural heritage shared by several different religious traditions.

9. How are the LMU Munich and the Goethe University Frankfurt a good home for the project, and what will that collaboration look like?

Ronny Vollandt: The team of the Munich Research Centre for Jewish-Arabic Cultures has been researching the Arabic Bible for a number of years now. I myself can look back on many years of research experience in the field of Arabic Bible translations of Jewish and Christian origin, as well as their reception in Islamic literature. In particular, through the preparatory work carried out within the DFG–DIP research project Biblia Arabica, a foundational basis, for the first time in the history of scholarship, has been made available for a comprehensive academic investigation of the Arabic Bible. The aim of the project was to establish scholarly standards for the study of the Arabic Bible and to close existing research gaps, thereby anchoring a previously neglected field of research within the international scholarly landscape in a way that is both internationally visible and intellectually stimulating. Now it is possible to build on this foundation with a 21-year project.

Nathan Gibson: In Frankfurt, the Goethe University has been a home for research and teaching on religious and interreligious history, across several faculties and programs (Protestant Theology, Catholic Theology, Islamic Studies, Judaic Studies, History, and the working group on Semitic languages). The professorship I hold with a focus on Jewish-Islamic relations was created as a result of this interest. And this research program is about to expand significantly through the newly funded regional LOEWE Center “Dynamics of the Religious,” where I have a subproject. There are also a number of institutes and academies connected to the university, which are responsible for public outreach in Frankfurt, within and beyond, Jewish, Christian, and Islamic circles. Goethe University has also been placing a priority on digital competencies and open science. This project fits perfectly with those initiatives. And, finally, there is even a connection to another academy project (Buber-Korrespondenzen Digital) in the faculty of Protestant Theology, which is using the same HTR technology we plan to use. The teams in Munich and Frankfurt will be similarly staffed and will work quite tightly together on the same objectives. Nevertheless, the team in Frankfurt will have a special responsibility for coordinating the digital aspects of the project, while the team in Munich has specialized skills in investigating the production and usage of manuscripts.

10. What’s special about an academy project?

Ronny Vollandt: It’s simple: 21 years. This is something special about the German academies — that they fund long-term research, foundational things that can only be accomplished in this kind of framework. But more than that, both of our academy partners, the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and the Academy of Sciences and Literature Mainz, have massive experience in text edition projects and in digital humanities. They also do public outreach to engage the public on these topics. These are not simply funders; they make sure the project comes to life, gains visibility, and contributes something long-lasting to society.

Suggested Citation: Biblia Arabica, “Biblia Arabica becomes an Academies project: Q&A with Nathan P. Gibson and Ronny Vollandt”, Biblia Arabica Blog, 3 February 2026, URL: https://biblia-arabica.com/biblia-arabica-becomes-an-academies-project-qa-with-nathan-p-gibson-and-ronny-vollandt/. License: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.